Hello, Sid here. I’m one of the volunteers working on the garden. I’ve been here virtually from the start to now. It was hard to see what the garden was going to look like in the beginning – it just looked like a barren bit of wasteland, a bit of beaten up grass.
Now it has been transformed into a proper garden – it looks like someone has spent years looking after this garden and put a lot of time and effort into it.
For me, my main role has been hard landscaping. It was really physically demanding work. Firstly we had to create the mounds out of waste soil, for the plants, and do a lot of the digging and concreting for the hard landscaping. It’s tiring and I have slept well.
It’s a once in a lifetime thing to come to Chelsea…people like me may not get the chance to go to the show again. It’s good. I met a lot of people from Eden – they worked really hard on the garden. Paul coped well with all the people who came and went…trying to organize all those people was tough.
It was a good experience. It made you realize how hard people have to work to make a living as a gardener and how hard you have to work to keep your job sometimes.
There were interesting concepts with the plants – planting veg with plants you can’t eat – I never thought of doing things like that…so I’ll take some of that away with me.
It’s a shame that it only lasts for one week and they are gong to dismantle the garden. I took some of the plants away – some herbs and an apple of the earth – and I’m going to put them in a trough on the balcony where I live in Elephant and Castle.
Sid from St Giles Trust, Camberwell
